If you are like me, and just want to help people get better results, you might be hesitant to get too involved with academic work on systems theory.
Fortunately the Dialogfirst team includes Danish consultant, John Mortensen, who brings to the project a passion for the work of Etienne Wenger and "Communities of Practice". Etienne Wenger is actually a cognitive anthropologist.
Wenger writes "We frequently say that people are an organization's most important resource. Yet we seldom understand this truism in terms of the communities through whihc individuals develop and share the capacity to create and use knowledge. Even when people work in large organizations, they learn through their participation in more specific communities made of people with whom they interact on a regular basis. These "communities of practice" are mostly informal and distinct from organizational units.
"However they are a company's most versatile and dynamic knowledge resource and form the basis of an organization's ability to know and learn." (communities of practice, learning as a social system, Etienne Wenger - published in the "systems thinker" June 1998.
The "communities of practice" concept helps us realize is just how critical the relationships between people is to their basic competence, and ability to perform. Wenger's work goes on to show what needs to be achieved and managed in order to drive an organization towards peak performance.
This is precisely the kind of relationship work where Dialogfirst offers its strongest advantages. It can become the enabler for the kind of organizational optimization that Wenger writes about, and here in Dialogfirst we will be carefully following his work.
Already at a Dialogfirst training in Denmark, we learned how an understanding of this concept helped attendees to see how Dialogfirst could be most successfully applied. We will be incorporating this into our new webinar based trainings.
